Page 29 of Orc's Claim
I’m glad the men moved my table to the back, where I can effectively hide. I’m not ready to see him.
And yet I desperately want to. To ask if I meant anything to him at all. Anything beyond a wet, warm mouth willing to suck his cock.
It is the least I can do… as payment for your services.
His words still turn my stomach, but it’s my own naivete that makes me sick. Ryko had given me a choice that day. Or had that all been part of the manipulation? I’m no longer sure. I’ve played and replayed what happened between us and it always ends the same. With him dismissing me as a whore.
Or he might have spoken those horrid words to convince the other orc there wasn’t anything serious going on between us. Just him hooking up with a random woman for sex.
My heart races at the hope that it was nothing more than a lie fabricated to protect me.
But three weeks…. I’m caught in a confusing, never-ending loop of questioning what the truth is, leaving me to assess the situation objectively, if that’s possible.
If I were an outsider assessing the facts, I’d say he never wanted me. That I was little more than a challenge to him.
I scoff at the word. He likes challenges. He said as much nearly a dozen times.
I swallow, hard. Is that it, then? I’m resisting that interpretation because… because the truth is often hard to accept. Like when I learned my parents were killed in the first attack on Earth. Through all the horrors of the invasion, all the destruction around me, I still believed they’d suddenly walk through the front door of our house one day. But they never did.
After Ryko spoke those horrible words and I returned to the market, I convinced myself he had been covering for us, nothing more. I fully expected he’d explain himself the next day. But he never returned.
I entertained possibility after possibility, stacked the excuses for his cruel words and failure to return until they were towered so high they crumbled under the oppressive weight of the truth, taking my confidence with them.
I never found out why he didn’t return and I likely never will. But I can’t forget him.
Every time I convince myself he’s evil, that adorable grin of his pops into my head. That’s when all the memories flood me, from how tenderly he held me and the lessons he taught me to his ever-present desire to protect me.
Ryko did more than teach me how to survive in the woods; he built up my confidence. He helped me believe in myself again.
I can’t bring myself to hate him, despite the sense of betrayal and hurt. But that crushing sense of guilt from being so naïve, overwhelms me at times.
Closure. That’s what I need.
A sharp elbow pokes me in my ribs. “Stop daydreaming, sunshine,” Paloma says.
The nickname, said with love, no longer applies. I don’t smile much anymore. Though for her, I plaster a smile on my face. She has tried talking to me, to get me to tell her what’s been bothering me, but I can’t. Not yet.
“I’m not daydreaming,” I lie.
She shakes her head as if she doesn’t know what to do about me. “I guess Owen wasn’t exaggerating,” she says instead of prying about why I’m in a funk.
“What do you mean?”
She points to the entrance to our sector. Four hulking orcs, each one larger than the next, block the cobblestone path, barring anyone from entering or exiting.
And at the end of that line of orcs… Ryko.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RYKO
Kodex, Telin, and Verig, our neld, second only to our grak, stand shoulder to shoulder beside me at the entrance to the human sector. Our grak split off from us where we left the gorjas to graze and headed toward the bantaran sector.
“Atox said to make our presence known,” Kodex says.
“Make our presencefelt,” Verig corrects. “But only here, among the humans.”
My gut churns. Lily.
